


Mind Games

by pillow forts (pyroooah)



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst and Drama, BAMF Haruno Sakura, Day 2 Prompt "Hokage Shisui", F/M, Genjutsu Prodigy Sakura, Hokage!Shisui, Mind Manipulation, Non-Mass Au, ShiSakuWeekend082020, Shinobi Politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:48:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26022172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyroooah/pseuds/pillow%20forts
Summary: They have a reunion, four years later, under very different circumstances. Written for August 2020 ShisuiSaku week.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Shisui
Comments: 26
Kudos: 166





	Mind Games

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to @riashishiria for sitting down and combing every single detail in this. Oh and also @flowergirl for helping me fix this up. 
> 
> I deliberately avoided some tags because spoilers. It should go without saying, but Shisui and Sakura have an age-gap of like seven years. But I thought I'd mention incase this bothers people. 
> 
> Also, y'all made Shisui Hokage, can I express first of all how dangerous that is. Like do you have any idea what that would mean for the Konoha government with freaky eyeball powers like his—

Shisui was fifteen when he first used the Kotoamatsukami. 

The air shifted in the basement of the Naka shrine. Talks of the coup began to shift as well. Shisui—after months of pent up confusion and anger and trapped between his clan and the village—had painstakingly researched all the targets involved in the coup. The rest of the shinobi population of the Uchiha clan would follow suite. 

His eyes burned. 

None of them noticed what had happened, but at once, all of the key players involved in the coup had been utterly convinced there was no coup, and their painstaking plans had been erased. 

He listened in silence as their minds were implicitly being infiltrated. Then the day after, single person in the room noticed the change of the topic apart from him. He sat in the corner of the room, shrouded in shadows as the meeting proceeded. The topic of the coup eventually ended, and they moved onto other matters. 

Shisui remembered that a few days prior, Fugaku gave him a long calculative look at a distance while he watched him train with his son. He knewabout the Kotoamatsukami. But now, Fugaku Uchiha's shoulders drooped in submission. 

He felt the power of the Kotoamatsukami diminish from his eyes completely. He closed his eyes. 

As he left the clan meeting, an ANBU dropped down beside him, and he told him that he was to see the Sandaime immediately. The village was on high-alert. 

* * *

Shimura Danzo was dead at midnight, and there was a charred battleground a few miles away from Konoha. Even if the Sandaime was the strongest Hokage in the history of Konoha, their battle can’t have been brief. 

Within a matter of hours, the village was in complete lock down, he and Itachi was summoned, and every ANBU in active duty was to subdue Danzo’s military and the ROOT base. The Sandaime, still in his war-armour, approached the Hokage's office, and a curfew was ordered over the village. 

“You should probably learn of what happened,” the Sandaime said. He walked towards his desk. "He had you tailed. My ANBU followed him, and I ordered his assassination. He attempted to get away. We fought some distance away from the village.” 

Shisui blinked in surprised. 

“I found a Sharingan eye on him,” he continued. “We’ve handed them over to the head of your clan. We found other ROOT agents who have been former Orochimaru's experiments. That's why we had him tailed for months." 

“ROOT is officially disbanded?" Shisui asked him. 

Hiruzen then looked at him with a nod.

"With this, we've subdued the efforts of the coup," 

And an impending massacre, Shisui thought. 

* * *

Two years passed. 

There was a young civilian girl at the academy, who displayed a prodigious talent for genjutsu. Her name was Haruno Sakura. She had one father, and her mother had been killed in a bandit raid during a trip to the Village of Hotsprings. She had been with her mother at the time. 

They say, he thought, trauma makes better genjutsu users. In that case, Sakura Haruno looked shy and lacked confidence. 

She eventually got placed under his mentorship while finishing at the academy, because her talent was so good, and the Hokage had eventually taken notice. 

Shisui glanced at the tiny slip of the nine year old girl. 

His first thought was that the girl’s hair was pink. She was a civilian. She would struggle more than her peers. Uchiha children were trained young and early. She smiled at him, and retrospect, he thought she had a pretty smile. He smiled back regardless. 

“I’m Uchiha Shisui,” he said. “Let’s get to know each other,” he said, as he took a seat on the roof of the Academy. 

She looked at him with a question. 

“Likes. Dislikes. Hobbies. Goals,” he elaborated. “I like Konoha and my family. I don’t like being woken up on my off days. I like training. My goal is to one day be as good as my grandfather.” 

She listened intently, and she continued. 

“I like… getting stronger. I dislike…mean kids.” She paused. “I like reading. I like my books and father and Ino. I want to become a strong kunoichi—so no one I love has to die in front of me again.” 

She looked determined. 

That’s when he’d felt like she was going to be someone great. 

* * *

.

.

.

“Stay close, Hokage-sama,” one of his ANBU told him. 

His ANBU rightened their position defensively as they burst through the opening of the terrace, and they approached the center to find more intruders at the Kage-summit from above. He could feel the rumble of battle beneath his feet. 

He narrowed his eyes as he followed them down the path, and that’s when one of his ANBU collapsed to the ground. Then the other ANBU fell, and then the other, and then the last one crumpled. 

Twenty-two year old Haruno Sakura sat on the railing of the terrace. 

Her Akatsuki cloak billowed around her, and she simply watched him—with one sharingan swirling in her right eye. It belonged to one of his clansmen. Who? He didn’t know. Her face—as he’d always remembered it with her bright green eyes, and beautiful pink hair—looked pinched and more tired than he’d remembered. 

“Shisui,” she said. 

“Sakura,” he whispered. How many years had it been since she’d disappeared? Four?

“They made _you_ Hokage?” she asked lightly as she stalked a circle around him and keeping near the railings, and he kept his eyes and senses fixed on her position. His ANBU Platoon—the best of the best—were still crumpled like paper. “I’ve always thought that they’d go for Sasuke’s brother—Uchiha Itachi.” 

“You have the sharingan,” he cut in. “How?” 

She simply looked at him and said nothing. His eyes bled into red.

“Why?” he asked her. 

She simply smiled at him.

 _“Why?”_ he snarled. “Why would _you_ do that?” 

“Power? I consider it a useful asset. The man was dying anyway.” 

A hunter-nin? A member of his clan? He grit his teeth. 

“And you didn’t save him,” he said bitterly. “Even with your healing skills. Tsunade’s _apprentice,_ ” he spat. 

“Why would I—a criminal missing-nin—be obligated to _save_ one of your ilk?” she asked him. She continued to stalk circle around the perimeter. “After all, why would I when power was within my reach?” 

He breathed in and breathed out before responding. 

“You’ve fallen… Sakura.” 

He released his ANBU from the genjutsu. 

* * *

She had been put on his cousin's team with the Jinchuuriki underneath Kakashi Hatake. They still met to spar, and she would then take another apprenticeship under Tsunade Senju. 

when she turned sixteen, and they were colleagues, Sakura stuttered as she told him that she had a crush on him. He found that endearing, and he felt flattered. He agreed to one date, and he told her it had to be a secret. 

It didn’t stop at one date. Then two. Then a few more. Then she was his girlfriend. 

Their relationship was still a secret to everyone but Itachi. 

They’d lie and talk for hours. Of their dreams. Of the things they liked. Of the future. They found quiet places, away from everything, and away from all the people who would ruin what they had. 

He bought her a necklace on one of his longer missions. He thought it would suit her. 

He watched her loop her hair to the side as she put it on.

“Does it look good on me?” 

He would look up at her and the light like a halo behind her head, and the sun reflected off the necklace she wore. It was a silver necklace with a flower pendant on it. It had a little ruby gemstone in the silver pendant. He always thought red was her color. 

“Yes,” he hummed with a smile. He reached up to touch her cheek. 

He wanted to capture the happiness in her face a memory forever. 

* * *

But he watched as she took down his ANBU again with painstaking ease. Her fingers glowed green with a scalpel, and she moved through their attacks, paralyzing one, sending the other flying with a single punch, and the sharingan improved her speed. She put one of them in a genjutsu using the sharingan, knocking him out, and Shisui was sure that he wouldn't be able to wake for a while. 

Their battle on the rooftop of the building was echoed by the battles happening throughout the building. But missing-nin Sakura was a lot more careful and controlled about her destruction—like he’d always implored her to be in her youth. 

The Akatsuki had a mission, and she was careful not to disrupt matters below her. 

“There’s a reason why non-Uchiha shouldn’t have the sharingan,” he began. “Their genetics cannot handle the sharingan.” 

“I’m a doctor, and Hatake Kakashi begs to differ,” she said. “No offense to your clan.” 

It was an old barb. 

“That’s right, you were a doctor.” He brought his fingers together to perform the signature fireball jutsu. “You had _dreams._ You wanted to save people. You told me—”

She brought her hands together too, and copies of her flitted through the terrace. 

The burning ball of fire streamed from his lips. It then began to gain in momentum, and it rolled over the rooftop. Heat rippled on his skin, as it burned everything in its wake, and it neutralized her copies. They flickered away, second illusion, the third, the fourth, and then the fifth. 

These were illusions—he thought—mirrors of her. A strange type of genjutsu she might have invented or learned which was immune to his sharingan. He would have to try it later, and it obviously worked on the sharingan. 

A strong genjutsu, he supposed. So many of them too. 

He lost track of the number of copies. They all flickered away as he spun on the ball of his feet and aimed the fireball jutsu in a circle at the copies. 

Only she would pioneer something like that. 

He smelt singed hair and clothes, neutralized his fire jutsu, and he swiveled around to meet her kunai—aimed for his back. His eye fell on the bridge of her nose, while her eyes fell on his jaw by default. He could see that some of her hair had been caught up in the fire. 

She aimed a punch towards him. He flickered out as she swiveled around to catch her footing.

“You chose to side with one organization that can start a war that would kill many people.” 

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe I agree with them. Maybe this world is all wrong." 

_“Liar,”_ he snarled. “Liar. _You_ don’t know what you’re talking about. You were _never never that kind of person_.” 

He didn’t know what made him angrier, that flicker of emotion in her eyes or how quickly she quelled it. 

* * *

She was eighteen. He breathed in and out after he said it. They were standing in her office, at the top floor of the hospital, where he liked to find her. He'd memorized the view from this office, and he'd been so used to carrying her back home after a bad session. Today was a different kind of day. 

“We can’t see each other anymore.”

“Why not me?” she asked him. “Why _not_ me?” 

“Because you’re—” 

“I’m what?” she said. “I thought… I thought you said that…” 

“The elders want me to marry someone else,” he said. “Because of the Uchiha bloodline. A woman who is—” 

“I’m…” she snapped. “ _What?”_

“Sakura…” he said. He cupped her face gently. “My sharingan line is one of the strongest in the clan,” he said. “They want me to marry a woman who can bear my children. Someone with the sharingan. Uchiha blood can carry the sharingan. Those without it cannot.” 

“You refer to me like I would taint your bloodline,” she snarled. She wrenched his arm away. “Like something dirty.” 

The pain of rejection was plain on her face, and she looked him in the eye then.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just the way my clan thinks. It's the way the elders speak." 

"And you?"

He didn't care if his child had the sharingan or not, but he did care for her. He didn't want to put her through the stress that the Godaime was going through in maintaining clan relationships to fall on her, so he had her believe whatever she wanted to believe about him. They were both very important people in the village. 

She was searching his eyes for something— _anything._

“What do _they_ know about genetics?” And then betrayal flitted through her eyes. “I thought you were different.” 

He didn’t reply. 

“I thought you said you _loved_ me too—” she cut herself off, and she clenched his shirt dragging him forward. He swallowed at the tears welling in her eyes. “Hey, this isn’t some kind of cruel joke, is it?” 

He wished it was. 

He’d always told her never to look an Uchiha in the eye, but in the most emotional moments, she abandoned reason. If it were any other situation, he would pull her forwards and wrap her in a hug to comfort her. Because Sakura was full of contradictions and her fists balled around his shirt, while her eyes drowned with tears. 

“Sakura.” 

Then she snapped. 

“I’ve been in love with you since I was twelve! _Twelve!”_

He shook his head. “I’m know—” 

“Why would you tell me you loved me too if this was all it was going to end up becoming?” 

“Because it was the truth,” he wanted to say. It just wasn’t meant to be.

They stared at each other

“Sakura—” he began. 

“Don’t tell me anything. Don’t _talk_ to me anymore.” 

She wrenched away from him. She slammed the door of the office, and he just looked at the floor blankly. If there’s anyone he wanted to save from the clutches of the clan, it was _Sakura._

He watched her leave. 

She didn’t understand, he thought. She didn’t understand why, and he didn’t want to let her. Sakura was too ambitious, too compassionate and so self-sacrificing.

He didn’t want to see her crushed by his clan, because she was the apprentice of the third Senju Hokage. The shadow of the Senju government loomed heavily over his clan once more with Tsunade Senju. 

* * *

And Akatsuki-level Sakura could have been a genjutsu prodigy with a sharingan, he thought. She could have been a far cry of what he remembered her to be as a younger fighter. She could have been an S-ranked criminal. Years and missions had honed her into a sharper, quicker and defter fighter. 

But he had more years on his back, being anUchiha, and he had trained for years. Shisui was born into the battlefield, and Sharingan-combat was second nature. For her, it wasn't. 

He flickered behind her, she swivelled around to meet his kunai. He was inches away from her face. She met his eye. Darkness rippled over the landscape of their minds and in their minds, she was stood there suddenly. 

“Everything here is under my control,” he echoed towards her. 

He walked up to her. 

She blinked her eyes in the dark. 

Sakura was then lifted mid-air in a plane of darkness, suspended by bright cords, which wrapped around her arms and legs. She looked confused, dazed, and she looked up. A energy bright energy beam was sent her way. He watched her pull at the cords of the genjutsu.

She looked at him, and he thought she made an awfully ethereal and strange sight when the light hit her eyes in a certain way, with her hair flaring around her. 

She gave him a determined look then. 

“No, this is my mind.” 

The illusion disintegrated. Shisui had to admit that he was impressed that she’d managed to dispel it. 

But took her a few seconds to recover, and he pushed her up against the pillar, and his eye flickered into the mangekyo pinwheels. But that’s when he caught sight of a glint of something dangling from her neck as he pinned her to the pillar with a binding technique. He froze when he recognized it. 

She blinked groggily into the present. 

"Don't." 

He wasn’t staring at her though. 

“Don’t waste it now,” she continued thickly. 

He just stared at the necklace hanging from her neck, and the ruby glimmered inside the flower, and then he slowly lifted his head at her face in disbelief. 

“It’s been ten years already, hasn’t it?” she continued. 

He stepped back, and his eyes flickered back to her lips. 

The necklace sparkled in the sunlight, and he didn't know what to think anymore, so he just listened. 

“You’re Hokage, I suppose,” she said. “An honorable Hokage will do everything for his village, and I suppose brainwashing me would be one of those things. But don’t _waste_ the Kotoamatsukami on me. Don’t be a fool now. You were never one.” 

He didn’t reply, but his throat was parched. 

“And if you used the Kotoamatsukami on me… what would you get?” she continued. “Me coming home willingly? I suppose I might ‘change’ my mind.” She licked the blood off her lip. "But... it won't change a thing." 

He didn't understand. 

“Honor,” he repeated softly. “A missing-nin preaching to the Hokage of honor.” 

She narrowed her eyes at him. But his mangekyo was swirling back into his sharingan. 

“They tried to get me married. I didn’t want to.” 

She didn’t reply immediately. For a brief second, it felt like it all didn’t matter. None of this mattered. They weren't standing amid a pile of rubble. She wasn’t a missing-nin. He wasn’t Hokage. 

Then she spoke. 

“You should get married,” she said. “Don’t pine over a missing-nin, Hokage-sama. It’s unbecoming.” 

He said nothing. 

She snapped her other hand backward, and she smashed it back against the pillar. The pillar shattered on impact. He flickered out of the way. Right on cue, they heard the sound of an explosion of glass and concrete beneath them, and Itachi and Sasuke flickered in front of him. A giant clay dome of a form was emerging from the summit building. The building shook. 

“Shisui, they came for the location of Killer B—” Sasuke began. He then turned his head in disbelief, and then Shisui and Itachi watched as Sasuke screamed her name. “Sakura!” 

“Sasuke,” she stated. 

_“Sakura!”_

He stumbled at first and then attempted to cross the distance between them. 

She simply gripped the claw of the clay bird leaving the building—Deidara of Iwa, and Hozuki Suigetsu of Kirigakure on it—and it yanked her away. She flipped onto its back and Deidara chuckled at Sasuke. There was also that mysterious Tobi individual, who simply gave them a long look. 

She turned away.

Tobi then used a time-space ninjutsu, and they warped out. 

And Itachi glanced at his face briefly, before he turned to check on the other ANBU. He watched Sasuke's back. Sasuke breathed hard as he balled his fists, crumpled to his knees and slammed the fist into concrete. 

* * *

“You’re a candidate for Hokage,” Itachi told him. 

“I heard. Tsunade-sama’s really going to toss someone like me the hat.” 

“It’s a good opportunity for you.” 

“The fastest shinobi at a desk doing paper-work? Man.” 

“Shisui.” 

“Mhmm?” 

“The village could use an Uchiha Hokage.” 

“Yeah, I know, but what about you?” 

“I need to be the clan head,” Itachi told him. He glanced his way. “You know why. I’m the only thing in between the clan and this village. I can’t be Hokage or they’ll accuse me of joining the Senju government.” 

And though he’d erased all plans of the coup, the Uchiha clan would always plot eventually with the coming of the third Senju Hokage. 

“Yeah, you’re right.” 

“Shisui?” 

“…” 

“It’s been a year.” 

She would have been nineteen two months ago. 

“They say she joined the Akatsuki.” 

He knew. 

'“They’ve had their eyes on her,” Itachi replied. “Since she’s a genjutsu prodigy and one of the Saanin’s apprentice.” 

“I know why _they_ chose her,” he said quietly. “But why would _she_ choose them?” 

Sakura went missing sometime after her eighteenth birthday, when he was on a mission. She wore a headband—the hunter-nin reported. There was a stroke over the leaf insignia, and she attacked Tsunade, and Tsunade was left injured. The Hokage Tower collapsed. They had said that Tsunade's apprentice had finally snapped. She left the village with hunter-nin on her tail. 

Naruto said he was going to bring her back no matter what, even if she was dragged back, but Sakura-chan would come back home. Sasuke withdrew into himself and trained and said nothing to anyone. He shrugged off comfort with ill-temper. Ino was _livid._ Her father was devastated, and he refused to speak to anyone. Kakashi continued as he always had, like shinobi in the village who lose everything. 

“Why would she do this to Naruto?” Shisui asked. “You know they are trying to find him, right? They attacked the Kazekage." 

“I don’t know. I wish it wasn't like this either, Shisui." 

They lapsed into silence. 

Itachi glanced at Shisui, who was leaning forward with his head in his hands. 

.

.

.

* * *

Sakura vaguely listened to them prattle on, and then bicker with each other, because neither Suigetsu with his dry humor or Deidara with his hot-head could be civil with each other. It reminded her vaguely of the arguments between Naruto and Sasuke in her younger days on Team 7. It felt like such a long time ago, and the life of a Akatsuki moved so fast, she had neither time nor energy to moon over the past. 

“That will be all,” the woman said. “Thank you for staying.” 

She moved first out the door, leaving the duo to follow if they wished, and Sakura squinted at the light of the sun. She flitted her hood over her head, and Deidara and Suigetsu followed her out the door. 

"Since when did you become leader, yeah?" Deidara asked her.

"Better pinky than you," Suigetsu retorted. 

Before they could erupt in another argument, Sakura simply flickered out, and they followed regardless. 

Inside the inn, the hostess folded a slip of paper, and she placed it in the hem of her sleeve. 

* * *

They all heard of the attack on the Kage-summit three weeks later. 

And to be frank, Tsunade was glad to give up the hat, the politics and the stifling resentment that came with being the _third_ Senju to take a seat in a village full of Uchiha and no clansmen. It didn’t help matters that she was the last Senju alive. Some one year, she tossed him the hat, and she left. 

Naruto trained at some distance, while Jiraiya sat some distance apart. They both then glanced up to see a messenger bird carry a scroll with it flutter towards Jiraiya. She walked towards him. 

The bird planted a claw on Jiraiya’s outstretched arm, and Jiraiya pulled out the scroll.

Jiraiya glanced down at the scroll which the messenger had carried, and he glanced towards Naruto who was lying by the river-side, looking upwards at the sky, eagle-spread.

“What does Sakura say?” Tsunade asked him.

“They’ve captured the three-tails. She… says that they intend to come for the nine-tails next.” He clenched his fists around the paper. “She also says to take care of Naruto like always.”

“They’ll attack Konoha,” she said with a frown. 

“What do you think we should do?” 

Tsunade—now retired Godaime Hokage—leant back against the tree looking quite worn and weary. 

War was on the horizon. The Akatsuki was unpredictable. The feud of the Senju and Uchiha continued to this day, and she wasn't going to lose her village to internal conflict, while the Akatsuki took it unaware. She left it in Shisui's hands, and Lady Tsunade and her apprentice fabricated their fallout. 

Orochimaru had taken an interest in Sakura in the forest of death, when she saved Uchiha Sasuke. His organization, the Akatsuki took notice of her skills after she beat Akasuna no Sasori when she was seventeen. They decided to contact her. 

Sakura accepted. 

When Sakura had gotten the Sharingan, because the organization had crossed Konoha-nin, Tsunade balked. There was probably some Uchiha who had his eyes harvested on death. 

Like all weapons, the Akatsuki probably believed that the genjutsu prodigy could become an even more effective weapon with the famed sharingan. From what she heard, they weren’t wrong. 

As for Sakura, she got that upper hand to propel her into becoming a more effective double agent, and eventually a weapon to use against the Akatsuki. 

Nearly three weeks ago, Sakura and the Akatsuki attacked the Kage-Summit. Sakura had fought the Sixth Hokage and his guards, and the guards had sustained casualties. Tsunade had _warned_ her to stay the hell away from him of all people—even if he was persistent. But this was unavoidable. 

Tsunade had found out that they were in a secret relationship after she left the village. Sakura's mission wasn't his business—in her opinion—and even if he was Hokage, she was still under the Godaime's orders. 

Two days ago, she got summons from the Sixth Hokage, and it weighed heavily in her pocket. She had yet to respond. 

"We have to tell him that Akatsuki will come to the village," she replied. "We have to give them Sakura's intel." 

But she had a feeling she knew why he requested she return. 

**Author's Note:**

> —Kotoamatsukami should be banned like, it should be activated once in never years. As if I needed another reason to hate how OP the sharingan is. 
> 
> Anyways. thanks for reading my ANGSTY fic. I hope you guys liked it. I don't know how to do the war-arc, and honestly I was really ambitious with this one but it will remain a one-shot. Everything else fell around it, and I had quite a headache by the end of it. 
> 
> There's some ShiSaku fluff in my profile called "Depth of Perception" where the Uchiha clan aren't as dramatic as I have portrayed them here if you want some tooth rotting fluff.


End file.
